Synopses & Reviews

Synopsis

Resurrection Party is a poetry collection that concerns itself, almost to the point of obsession, with the question of how the imagination grapples with the fear of death. The collection intertwines religious and mythical subjects and themes with more fleshly concerns about the body and decay, presence and absence. It has been described as containing poems of "almost exquisite refinement, illuminated by the taut glow of sensuous prosody and imagery" and as "a deeply meditative collection at once intelligent, tender, and utterly human."

"Michalle Gould's poems are a study in beautiful paradox-their meticulously crafted structures serve as containers for the wilderness that resides within. Their terrain is somewhere between body and spirit, life and death, intimacy and solitude, elegance and intuition. Possessing a sly humor coupled with a laser sharp awareness and assertion of how all is ephemeral, Resurrection Party accomplishes the rare: it makes even the big questions fresh." Louise Mathias, author of The Traps and Lark Apprentice

"Michalle Gould has been writing poems for years, and the long wait for her first book is finally over. In Resurrection Party, she intertwines the ancient and classic with the modern and popular, the sacred with the profane. The result is a deeply meditative collection at once intelligent, tender, and utterly human." Hayan Charara, author of The Alchemist's Diary and The Sadness of Others

"Michalle Gould's Resurrection Party feels like wandering the wondrous caverns of a strange museum in the nighttime quiet. Again and again, we encounter poems of an almost exquisite refinement, illuminated by the taut glow of sensuous prosody and imagery, and yet there is a thrilling queerness there, a trembling corporeal hunger. The body, its potential for ecstasy, is deeply connected to these pageants of resurrection. Gould writes, 'To be human is to be like a cloud chalked in the sky . . .' Such whimsy, such recreation, stalks the heavy, sometimes biblical landscape where so many narratives of what it is to be human unfold. In Resurrection Party, Gould invites us to play there, to imagine, to fall into our graves and rise again, over and over. And at this party, we get to be different every time." Michelle Detorie, author of After-Cave